Yeah, you go for it Vanessa. No one truly has dibs on the material. Your vision will be just as legitimate as anyone else's here.We have, so far, managed to tie in all the various fan-fiction so that there is a continuity, but there really isn't a reason why anyone shouldn't break from that if they wanted to.I can, however, give you an idea of what back history I will and won't be covering. I'd also happily incorporate any of your own ideas regarding the history of the Imperial Alliance that you will use in your story into my serialized story once I get off my arse and finish it. SPOILERSI don't go into any detail about the origin of the Imperial Master or Commander Makara in TROM.I do go into great detail regarding the mask like symbionts and the planet of their origin and how the Imperial Master captured these pure symbionts and implanted them onto brain washed candidates causing them to be corrupted over many generations.END OF SPOILERSPlenty of scope there to run wild, I think.

Thank you Shane, and guys OK I will carry on regardless!The "Rise of the Alliance" is complete and finished and "out there", and does fit in with the other fan fics so far.All my ideas about the history of the Alliance are in my story, on the X-archive. I would be quite chuffed if there were any ideas from it you might wish to incorporate in your own serial Funnily enough I didn't go into detail about the origins of the Symbionts, other than that the Master used them to control his minions.In my next fic, "The Eternal Continuum" I pick up on the threads from my last story, and explore the origins of Makara and Captain Halley's father, Captain Corliss, a lot more. I have them as one-time lovers from the same ethereal plane as the F01. Makara falls from grace and is banished to the "real world" where she is forced to possess the bodies of unfortunate victims to continue her survival. Corrupted by the Imperial Master to his evil cause, and subverted by his symbiont, she becomes the "Angel of Death" that Corliss has to stop, once and for all.Now I was going to pick up Makara's story as she lay in the wreckage of the Imperial Cruiser, but you've already done that. So I could just as easily pick up her story once she has played her part in your TROM fic. Are you able to able to give me some details about this so I can carry on her story after yours?If not, that's OK as I feel I can pick up Makara's tale from where the original Star Fleet left it.Maybe this should all be on another thread?OOps! I'm looking forward to reading your works one day Shane.

Yeah, this place has been so starved of posts over the years I think the occasional off-topic post is never worried about too much. Also, this forum has been so friendly and civil that there's never been any real need to mod.But I'll mod myself on this occasion so I don't hijack the Amalgamation thread (which I'm also interested in).I'll start a spoilery nuts 'n' bolts thread about TROM in the relevant forum. This can work alongside the official TROM thread, which I think is 3 chapters into the story now. I'll post your message over there, Vanessa, and write some thoughts.

I was a bit worried about hijacking the Amalgamate thread.I was thinking that this forum was a bit quiet. I used to be heavily involved in another forum a few years ago. Whilst I didn't do any of the setting up or monitoring, I was the "expert" as regards the subject matter of the forum itself and spent a lot of time answering people's queries and solving problems to do with the forum subject matter. It can kind-of take over your life a bit But it was a very busy forum, lots of diffferent posts every day, from around the world. Quite different to this forum.I will pop over to Shane's new TROM spoilery thread.whooosh............

I think, from your re-introduction of the idea a week or so ago we now have 2 wiki jobbies (technical term). One that Crash has just started for the amalgamation and another which Bradster had already started.Not sure if the two are going to be merged? Wouldn't mind knowing the details as I'd like to take a crack at writing a few pages myself.

I would merge them for certain. I think Brad's theme for it looks great as well and that write-up for the X-Bomber ship looks really good too - (but there are 3 machinegun turrets, for sure). If Brad wants to host it publically somewhere, I will add my solitary article to it and that would be fine because I'm not sure how much time I'll have to look after it and make the changes that people want but I always get around to it.If you need a host, you can always send me the contents as a zip somehow and I'll try and integrate that content on not-really-my server. Although I'm not sure how you do that.At least the biggest question which was "what software do we use?" has been answered seeing as we both chose the same and if we want proper control over it we can easily forget Wikia.Although Mediawiki doesn't seem to perform all that quickly on my server and the way it organises data in its file-structure seems confused to me. I guess its real structure is in the database and what the uploaded filenames are is incidental.

Sorry for the double-hit. I couldn't edit my last.Dave and I propose a category structure for project 'el grando wiki' (wherever we host it) as follows:Front Page [ Updates and some News and displaying the list of categories. ]ENCYCLOPAEDIAShips - Alliance i.e. Carter's Astrofighter - EDF i.e. X-Bomber - Other Characters - EDF - Alliance - OtherLocations- (best to keep the categories as logical and as few as possible for simplicity)STORIES [ Fan-fictions (and maybe some series synopsis and guides to a selection of episodes if it was felt that we could improve over the existing SFXB versions) ]MERCHANDISE and Real World Star Fleet (like DVD releases etc.)Articles such as X-Bomber (the ship) should probably be split into two sections: canon info (green header) and then non-canon observations (red header).Any ships/characters/locations only from peoples' fictions would obviously be labeled as non-canon in red in their articles.